CURRENTS: AWARDS; In Design Awards, Something Old And Something New

By PHILIP NOBEL

Published: May 17, 2007

Since the inception of the National Design Awards program in 2000, when it was announced with much fanfare at the White House, the awards, overseen by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, have been a mixed bag. While it's nice to see designers like Morris Lapidus honored for their work, the awards have never become as prestigious as the Pritzker, known as architecture's Nobel Prize, and they have often seemed to lack focus. When last year's winners were announced, Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week finally said what many were thinking when he wrote on his blog that, as a tool for promoting innovation, ''the National Design Awards are a failure.'' Perhaps this year's jury, which included the irreverent architect James Wines, the downtown design fixture Stephen Burks and Caterina Fake, a founder of the photo-sharing site Flickr.com, got the message. Some of the winners announced on Tuesday were predictable: Antoine Predock, in the lifetime achievement category; Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, in a category called design mind; Peter Walker, the World Trade Center Memorial landscape architect; the graphic designer Chip Kidd; Apple's Jonathan Ive, in the product design category; and Adobe Systems, for corporate achievement. But there were also a couple of surprises. Boston's experimental Office dA won the architectural design award, over a local favorite, Enrique Norten, and the Lower East Side architecture firm Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (partners Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki and David J. Lewis are shown above, from left, with their 2000 Geltner Loft project) won for interior design over the powerhouse David Rockwell. PHILIP NOBEL